The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [22]
I give him a look. He ignores me and keeps on talking. “They met at that fast-food place, Dr. Enchilada’s. She quit that job. She said she went home smelling of guacamole and that the karma was bad. The karma was bad! Really, you should talk to her. Incidentally, while we’re on the subject, you should stop talking to me. This is getting much too personal. But as long as you’re collecting stories, did I ever explain to you how I got the dog back?”
“No.”
“You’re going to think this is funny. I know you. It’ll make you chuckle. But it wasn’t funny at all. It’s a comic story, just not comic to me.”
MY SISTER AGATHA lives north of here, in Five Oaks. You’ve been there, I believe. She’s married to a guy named Harold, who happens to be a barber. A really incompetent barber, by the way, just as a barber, though he’s a nice guy in other respects, nice enough, anyhow, for what his daily life requires. “Nice” isn’t much of a virtue, though; kindness and mildness aren’t on the map anymore, not these days. They’re trivial. As it happens, Harold learned how to cut hair when he was in the Army. Certainly that could explain it. His father was a security guard, worked for Brinks. You let Harold cut your hair and you’ll emerge smelling of Clubman and looking like Boris Karloff out for a night on the town.
They have two kids, my nephews. Harold was in love with a married woman years ago, Louise, her name was, and Louise had a son I always thought Harold had fathered, but that’s another story, and I think he’s over that by now. He got over that when he met Agatha.
But this was about the dog, Bradley. I had taken Bradley out of the Humane Society and arranged to sneak him up to Five Oaks and to board him with Agatha and Harold, until I had accustomed Kathryn to dog householding, to living with a dog. My sister and Harold have a big house up there in Five Oaks, with plenty of room for a mutt. Their colonial is close to a WaldChem plant, and the house has five bedrooms and didn’t cost them too much, because of the chemical fumes or the poisoned groundwater or something, or simply because they’re located in central Michigan. It’s a huge house. Anyway, I thought it would take about a month for me to talk my then-wife Kathryn into tolerating a canine companion. I thought we needed a dog, required one. I thought our marriage required a dog. Young married people crave dogs. It cements them together. It gives them baby practice.
But I didn’t have to talk Kathryn into our having a dog because she picked up a chair and threw it at me and left me for Jenny. When she threw that chair, she missed me, by the way. She could’ve broken my head open. Besides, what was so bad about what I said? Was she a lesbian? Or was it me? As a man? I wanted her to clarify my thinking. I was just trying to get her transformation lucid in my mind. She says I cursed at her but that is not the case. I may have raised my voice, but I did not curse. Anyway, after that climactic moment, I was alone by myself in the apartment, and I wanted that dog, Bradley, back. I shouldn’t say this, but I felt grief. And I needed that dog. I had nothing to hold on to except that dog, that dog with my name on it, my secret sharer, you might say.
So on a bright Saturday morning in early winter I called my sister, Agatha. I told her I was going to drive up to her house in Five Oaks and get Bradley the dog and take him back home. Thanks for keeping him all this time, I said. I thought I should warn her I was coming, to ensure that she’d be around when I appeared on her doorstep.
“Uh,” she said, “I don’t know about that.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“You can’t have Bradley back, is what I mean.” There was a long pause, and I could hear domestic noise in the background.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry, Bradley. But I can’t do it. You can’t have the dog back. We’re keeping him.”
“Agatha,